Mark Robinson has hijacked his own campaign in North Carolina

“Rfor him “Martin Luther King on steroids,” Donald Trump told a rally in North Carolina three days before Super Tuesday. Mark Robinson, the lieutenant governor and Republican nominee for governor who was Mr. Trump, may not like it. Mr. Robinson, who is black, had described King as a “patron of Erces” and the civil rights movement as a “communist rising movement.” On September 19th CNN The unearthed comments make it even clearer that Mr. Robinson—now the party’s nominee, with less than 40 days to go until the election—is no beloved preacher of justice. Writing on Naked Africa, a porn site, he called himself “Black Nazi“, noted that he was not in the Ku Klux Klan because they “don’t let blacks join” and said that if they brought back slavery, which he wished they would, he would “surely buy some.”

More screenshots from the forum, where Mr. Robinson has for more than a decade registered his full name, show the candidate describing sex with his sister-in-law and an appetite for “Tranny on Girl Porn.” In a video posted on X, Mr Robinson denied the words were his, calling the report a “high-tech execution”. His top campaign staff resigned this week, and the Republican Governors Association said it would not buy him any more advertising.

At a diner tucked into the Blue Ridge Mountains, Mr. Robinson rallied supporters on Sept. 23 with the wrath of a coach whose team was down in the fourth quarter. “They may well beat us up right now, but guess what, we’re not going anywhere,” he said. Sitting in one of the booths, Rivera Doutet, a friend who lost in the primary to replace him as lieutenant governor, says Southern women who love Jesus will forgive him if the allegations are true. His campaign blames the media for diverting attention from politics. “If people who support the Second Amendment were abusing the Second Amendment like these people were abusing the First Amendment, there would be none of us,” the candidate said, to “Amen.”

When Mr. Robinson secured the nomination, experienced Republican workers warned that he was too extreme to win the state. Although he has a working-class story to run down the aisle—he grew up the ninth of ten children in a poor, desperately violent home, and finished university only to be in office in 2022—in his views abortion should be illegal at “zero.” Weeks, saying women should control their genitals better, that gay people are “Maggots” and that “some people need to be killed,” a reference to his political enemies, did not go down well. Josh Stein, his moderate Democratic opponent, has surged by five to 15 points at the polls all summer.

Eye health for new comments actually ends up a chance for Mr. Robinson to win. The question is how much damage the fallout will do to other Republicans in the swing state.

They have two big concerns. The first is the presidential race. By entering the contest in July, Kamala Harris put the state that Mr. Trump won by 1.4 points in 2020 into play. according to EconomicForecast model, North Carolina is as competitive for Democrats as Georgia, a state with the same number of electoral college votes (16) that went to Joe Biden. Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Robinson now looks like a liability. The Harris campaign plans to tie the two men to each other as closely as possible in the hopes that the scandal will cause independents to sit out the election. Because Mr. Trump needs North Carolina to win, he will have to campaign there. But until Mr. Robinson mixes it up publicly, his messages about Democrats and the economy may fall flat, says Chris Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University. At a rally in Wilmington two days after the news broke, Mr. Trump sidestepped the matter.

Congress is the second problem for Republicans. North Carolina is among a handful of states that will determine control of the House this year because it is home to one of the most narrow races in the country. For Democrats, Don Davis is fighting to keep his seat in the state’s 1st District after Republicans repositioned the maps in their favor. At the end of June Laurie Buckhout, Mr. Davis’s opponent, lost him four to one. But after she proudly campaigns with Mr. Robinson, she may have a problem with the county’s 40% black population. before CNN The report emerged, Ms Buckhout deleted a photo of the two from X.

For months, Republican strategists have been hoping that voters would apply the same logic to Mr. Robinson as many do to Mr. Trump: Even though they don’t like him, they are voting for him because they like his policies. This is like wishful thinking. The latest stretch of elections in North Carolina will be a test of whether one man can sully the party’s brand. Jonathan Felts, an adviser to Mr. Robinson, believes Republicans will prevail if they keep talking about gasoline and fentanyl prices. He says personal attacks won’t go far if the candidates are good. Across the state, members of his party are praying he’ll be right. ■

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